


A Hole So Deep, I Can Barely See The Light

by Unique_Username_7



Category: anime - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25659469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unique_Username_7/pseuds/Unique_Username_7





	A Hole So Deep, I Can Barely See The Light

I’m sorry. I don’t even say that to the people who deserve to hear it, and those two words carry only a fraction of my regret. Does writing about the depths of my mistakes instead of fixing them as much as I know I could count as wallowing in those mistakes. Yes. I had an instinct to say, “Maybe,” but I try not to be uncertain anymore and stutter through all my speech with an “Um,” a “Maybe,” or a pause. Though, it’s a constant fight to try and reach for a genuine, unfiltered relationship in my life. There’s an extent of physical and perceptional distance I can put between myself and everyone around me before I lose my mind and sink into my own mind as I’m losing it. Though, after an elementary school experience of constant praise, being considered the nicest person in class and a math genius by most teachers and students in my class, I ended up with a complex about keeping up that lofty facade in front of other people. In spite of that, even near the end of elementary school, my grades were starting to decline, my parents had divorced and one had remarried, and I generally got to see fewer of my friends in the after care program. On top of that, even in that time of constant praise, I was always a fairly shy kid, only beginning to become gradually more outgoing towards other people as my five years at the same elementary school made me more comfortable around the familiar faces who accompanied me. Over time, most everyone got to know me, and I made some of my most fondly reflected upon memories in that time period. Though, as I moved into middle school, my grades continued to decline, more of my old friends had moved to different areas in the world or just gone to different schools, and my gradually improving outgoingness practically reset in 6th grade. Now, I still knew a lot of people in my middle school, since it was a sister school to my old elementary school. It’s more that my declining self-esteem due to my increasingly lackluster grades having quietly dissolved everyone’s reference to me as a mathwiz. Eventually, I opened up more in middle school as well, as I still had several bizarre, unique, or just likable traits which people were enamored with enough to give me confidence in myself to press onward with a more positive attitude. I was still generally regarded as the kindest guy in my grade, I still was one of the most openly flamboyant dancers in my school, and my reputation as a writer was still noticed by most people, even as those traits were becoming more subdued in actuality than anyone but me probably had noticed. If I had to mark a real turning point where my life had started to fly off its preset tracks to success as a writer (having written ~90 pages of a novel in the summer when I was 9 and turning 10), it would be with my introduction to the Internet. With my dad giving me access to a laptop around when I was 9, I got fully exponentially more immersed in YouTube with each passing year. I barely used any other sites for a while either. In my leisure time, I mostly only used YouTube. I looked up web animation and content from the cartoon community, and I would sink deeper into cartoon fandom in particular throughout middle school, even though I never attended any conventions and rarely got merchandise or paraphernalia like most fans. I just completely locked myself into YouTube. For years, this continued. I avoided extracurricular activities more and more over the years, not even feeling self-confident enough to try my hand at a sport until, by high school, I had nothing left. After moving in with my mom in a different country for high school, I still had anxieties about joining clubs due to perceiving them as requiring too much skill and dedication for me to possibly get into now. These were no longer the metaphorical little leagues of baseball, basketball, karate, etc., where I could just experiment with different activities until I found one I truly liked; people were joining these clubs who were committed and passionate about the sports. I was just a guy who liked playing them. I almost never even watched sports on TV; I just liked playing certain sports. I at least got a black belt in karate, so that makes my 7 years spent doing that a marked success. Though, the more independence I was given; the more I delved head-first into the Internet and avoided any physical interaction. My main two pass-times at that point were looking at porn (on and off throughout middle school and high school), watching writing analysis videos on YouTube, and watching cartoons and later anime. I had always wanted to change, to finish that novel, to get into some sort of substantial club activity, to make new, genuinely close friends at my high school, to improve my grades, to do this and to do that. Though, through the half a decade of introspection, compounding self-hatred, and lowering self-esteem, I became scared. Being scared was nothing new to me, I was always shy in every stage of my life for various reasons and rationales which all branched from me being scared of being disapproved of. I’m not certain of how it began, since it stuck with me for as long as I can remember, but my current guess is that it started with my parents often being sharply aggressive at times when I made mistakes. Whether it be an aggressive tone for messing up a technique when practicing a sport or being repeatedly harshly criticized for crying in almost every situation when I did so, often aggressively reprimanding towards small mistakes is what I theorize is the root of this long standing fear throughout my life. That’s not to say that I blame all of my long line of life mistakes on my parents nor that scolding wasn’t mostly appropriate for larger mistakes or just genuinely selfish decisions on my part. It’s just the harsh and frequent criticism of small mistakes in particular in my childhood that, from my memories, I conjecture gave me a deep-seeded paranoia of being sharply criticized by anyone who I made a mistake in front of. This would spiral into my propensity for lying to almost everyone I came into contact with in order to avoid revealing anything I sensed that I would be criticized for. Even now, I mostly deal with criticism on the Internet by releasing writing and videos on websites where I can distance myself from the criticism because it’s not coming from physical people and it’s not coming from people I care about or will likely ever meet again online or IRL. Though, I still struggle to put myself out there wholeheartedly in places where how people perceive me has consequences I care about and that I’ll have to come into contact with again. Thus, I’m often completely stifled, sinking deeper into a deluge of self-deprecating thoughts and jacking off to my own imagined erotic animations that I’m scared that I’ll never make because I never do anything because I only lay in bed, listening to YouTube videos, and content to shut out the rest of the world for as long as I can. While this isn’t the entirety of how my life has been for the past 15 years, nor even all the details I would consider relevant to this story, it’s a general picture of what it’s been like to feel increasingly dead figuratively and on the verge of bringing myself to death physically. While the few friends from that journey who I’ve kept contact have made exponentially more progress than I have in their paths in their passions and towards fulfilling their aspiration, and the YouTubers I’ve been obsessively following online for the past few years and the classmates I’ve studied with have seemingly only been improving themselves for the past five years to such a degree that I cry and bow in sheer reverence of how much they’ve grown and are growing, my time feels stopped. I know that I’m physically alive and changing, but my actually feelings only relay how stagnant and self-destructive my life has been for the past five years. I’ve been content with laying in bed day after day for as long as possible, often too scared to try anything different even when I know there is a likely possibility that it can help me to feel better. Though, at the time of writing this letter, and after years of introspection, I think I’ve realized that that’s the only thing I’ve been self-confident in doing, and that’s why I fell back on it. I became confident that I would always hate myself, confident in lying in bed, confident that I would listen to YouTube for hours on end, confident that I would never achieve my dreams. Everything else was too uncertain for me to put any faith in myself in being able to achieve. Therefore, I never tried. Throughout this piece, I’ve omitted much of what I’ve learned in those five years of introspection, the legitimately good advice I’ve gotten from those YouTube videos, and how I’ve related what I learned to my experiences over the years, but again I’m not jamming everything in this one story. Though, one of my conclusions is that excessive self-confidence is probably necessary for me to achieve my ambitions. I think I had villainized self-confidence as a bad thing by mistaking the overconfidence displayed in cartoon episodes whose message was to be more humble as the only kind of self-confidence one could have. Though, no. Confidence definitely is and has always been necessary for the most revolutionary minds of the world to achieve the heights of their creative potential. It’s also often necessary for most people to get by in life without feeling as depressed as I was. I’m not perfect (I’m sure I’ll repeat myself many times in my work and still publish it anyways because I just want somebody to hear some of the shit that goes on in my head), and I’ll probably fall flat and get seriously hurt emotionally and/or physically along the way to achieving my dreams. Though, there’s this line from My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU which might be the most recent instance of a quote sparking a revelation in how I perceive life, “The present isn't everything, but there are things you can only do now, things you can only find here. It's now or never. Think, Writhe, Struggle and agonize. If not, what you are going through isn’t genuine.” What I took from that is basically, the agony which comes with following your aspirations in the here and now is going to be deeply, consistently painful, but that has value in it being what makes that aspiration genuine. I’ll embrace the suffering which comes with this arduous life of struggle towards my ambitions, and I’ll appreciate every second of it for how genuine it is. I’ll work all day and all night with the fervor of the starving animators who made that anime if I had to, and maybe I’ll send some messages as powerful as SNAFU’s along the way. Though, I’ll keep in mind to appreciate every failure or success, and I’ll try as much as possible with confidence in every step that success is a possibility. Whether I win or lose, I know I’ll at least be alive, evolving, and moving towards the “me” who I want to be.


End file.
